Articles and postings for consumers who want to get the most out of their PCs using software from eSupport.com™, owned by Phoenix Technologies®. eSupport products include BIOSAgentPlus™, DriverAgent®, RegistryWizard™, UndeletePlus, and Phoenix Freeze™.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Back to School – Make Sure Your PC Gets a Passing Grade

With fall just around the corner and school starting up again, it’s a really good time to do a check up on your computer. You want to make sure things get started off right, so that there can’t be any "my computer ate my home work" experiences.

Below are our ABCs to good PC health:

A. Accidentally Deleted Your Homework? – We all know stuff happens, especially at 2am or 3am when you’re cramming to get that term paper finished. There’s a good software tool available called UndeletePlus(http://www.undeleteplus.com/) that you should have on hand, just in case the unthinkable happens. What’s cool about UndeletePlus is that in addition to being able to recover deleted files from a PC, it can also restore data from flash drives, memory drives, and even, cameras.

B. Beware of Bloatware – Almost every new application that you load onto a PC automatically adds some extra code to the boot-up process. This additional code is often called "bloatware" and not only increases the boot time for the computer, it uses up system memory. Because this slows down your PC, it’s important to remove any extraneous software from your laptop.

C. Security – One of the best things you can do to avoid online trouble, is to download a free Web guide called SiteAdvisor (http://www.siteadvisor.com/) from McAfee. SiteAdvisor displays green, yellow, and red safety ratings in the browser for every website that is visited. If SiteAdvisor rates a site red, it means that the site has a history of misbehavior that could include malware, spyware, Trojan horses, rootkits, spammer and more.

Also, SiteAdvisor provides ratings on search results and even has pop-up alerts if you try to download free Hot Girls of Pensacola wallpaper from a risky website. SiteAdvisor is all about safe surfing, something everyone should practice. In addition to a Web guide, you should have anti-virus software.

D. Don’t Be Tardy – Don’t you hate it when it takes forever for your computer to do anything? There are a couple of chores you can do to keep it running at peak performance. One is cleaning your PC’s registry so that you can work at top speed and not miss "due dates."With each new application that gets installed or each setting is changed within Windows, the registry gradually gets cluttered, slowing down your system, and can causing some unexpected problems. RegistryWizard™ (www.registrywizard.com) is an all-in-one tool that detects and automatically corrects errors in your registry. It will help optimize and stabilize the performance of your computer.

E. Educate Yourself – Take time to learn a little about updating device drivers to keep your PC from crashing. Lesson One: What are device drivers? Buried within a PC’s software are a multitude of small programs that tell the core processor how to interact with the world. These are called drivers. They are critical to a PC’s performance. Actively maintaining these drivers can boost performance and reduce problems, allowing you to get the most from your PC.

DriverAgent™ (http://www.driveragent.com/) is the industry's best driver updating software. It’s has more than 12.5 million drivers from nearly a thousand manufacturers.

F. Put the "Freeze" on Unwanted Access – Don’t you hate it when you get up from your desk for a second and your goofy roommate (let’s call him Jack the Laptop Hijacker) jumps on to your computer and starts doing who knows what….? Yeah, it’s so junior high that you can’t trust him, but it’s your reality, at least, until the end of the semester. So what are you going to do?